Blade, directed by Stephen Norrington, is a superhero movie that begins with a blood rave. We get a brief origin story by way of a flashback to 1967 where a woman goes into premature labor after being attacked by a vampire – and then we cut straight to a club that makes Gotham City look like Disney World. The sprinkler system goes off, blood rains from the ceiling, and everyone is soaked. Welcome to the first commercially successful live-action Marvel movie.
And that’s something that people tend to forget: Blade ushered in a new era of the superhero genre – comic book movies that don’t feel like comic book movies, ones that take the character off the page and adapt the material into media that has a little something for everyone. Gore? Zombies? Romance? Bad guys with guns? Blade ticked all the boxes. Plus, he was cool. He was cooler than Dolph Lundgren’s Punisher (1989), and he reminded fans of Brandon Lee’s The Crow (1993), guns a-blazing in a menacing leather trenchcoat.
Then there's there fact he’s a vampire hunter…who’s also a vampire. Well, technically he’s a "Daywalker," or a human-vampire hybrid who can walk around in the daylight (without catching on fire) and comingle with regular folks. In the comics, he wielded teakwood knives and wore a color palette similar to that of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. In the movie, screenwriter David S. Goyer upgraded him to a sleek, samurai-esque assassin. In addition to a pair of samurai swords, he has a gun packed with hollow silver bullets – that are filled with garlic.
And what’s a cool superhero without an equally cool villain counterpart? When we have our first real encounter with Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) he shows up to a board meeting full of straight-laced suit-wearing vampire elders with a cigarette in hand, beard scruffy and his hair elegantly disheveled. He’s young, hot, rich, and hating it. "We wanted [Frost] to be almost like a character from a Bret Easton Ellis novel," Goyer told Entertainment Weekly in a 2019 cast reunion. Frost isn’t a ‘pure-blood’ like the stuffy suits, he and his crew are new money – they became vampires by being bit, rather than born. Dorff wanted to play Frost as someone so effortlessly chill and charming that the viewer forgets he’s a bad guy altogether – until the moment he pulls out a gun or slits a throat.
Blade’s hunt for Frost eventually brings us to his lair, which is a high-tech, sky-rise condo with glass walls and a rooftop pool (that’s filled with rubber duckies for some reason). It’s these post-modern, neo-futurist, details that help create the film’s colder atmosphere: the nighttime scenes are cast in a wintery blue light, the computers display black screens with Matrix-style green font, and Frost sleeps in a modern-day metal tomb that opens with the push of a button. At Whistler’s (Kris Kristofferson) shop, Karen (N’Bushe Wright) is given vampire mace and a portable cannon that emits a flesh-burning UV light. No wooden stakes or crosses here.
It’s Karen, a hematologist turned vampire victim, who gives the film its warmth. Realizing there isn’t much time before she becomes a reluctant member of the undead, Karen decides to join Blade in his quest to bring down evil at its core. It’s not long before she’s donning a leather jacket, a gun, and kicking vampire ass. Goyer, who wrote her character specifically for the film, wanted her to be "more than just a girlfriend character," with Snipes describing her as an homage to icon Pam Grier and the '70s era of Blaxploitation films. Karen helps Blade find his humanity, giving his otherwise bleak life some newfound purpose in the process.
The movie's legacy is undeniable. Without Blade, there would be no Batman Begins or The Dark Knight. And I mean this quite literally: Goyer served as a writer for all three films in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. Less literally, it feels like there would be no The Batman, which director Matt Reeves even said "feels like a horror movie" and features a perfectly emo Batman played by Robert Pattinson. I’d even go as far as to say that there wouldn’t be a Suicide Squad, with its dark, violent take on superhero genre.
It seems worth noting too, that the first successful Marvel film had an obvious effect on DC films to come, whereas Marvel movies would become much lighter in tone and more accessible as the years went by. I've got to admit, this makes me nervous for a remake (though the numerous pre-production problems don’t exactly calm my nerves either.)
Some might argue that Marvel has some experience with darker adaptations. Morbius, for example, fits a similar tone (the man himself appears in the first Blade in a deleted cameo by Norrington) and Sony is building a Spider-Man world that’s more bloody than the Marvel Cinematic Universe could ever imagine. But the Blade remake was announced as part of Marvel Phase 5 – which means Mahershala Ali’s Daywalker could be kicking it with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man or teaming up with (what’s left of) the Avengers or whatever else Kevin Feige decides to mastermind.
This all makes it hard to imagine a Blade reboot that isn't rated R or cloaked in weird blue light or doesn't have the man himself delivering insane one-liners like, "Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill," or "You tell him it's open season on all suckheads." But for now, at least we have the original, and as we mark 25 years since its release, there's never been a better time to revisit it.
For more, check out all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows that should be on your radar.
